Historian: Halfway In, How Will History Judge Trump?
Journalists, especially in today’s news media, “magnify the sensational at the expense of the significant,” while “the historian’s job is to do the opposite,” notes Arthur Herman at Fox News. And because Donald Trump’s term in office, which marked the halfway point Sunday, has been sensational, “that’s made it hard for journalists and pundits to see what’s happening underneath.” All the president’s personal flaws “are reflected in his tweets, which are the principal way a lazy media and commentariat have come to evaluate Trump and his presidency.” But while easy, this can be profoundly misleading, because “in the end history will judge Donald Trump not on his tweets but his deeds. And these, by and large, have reflected his undeniable virtues.”

From the right: Trump Should Go Big on Immigration
President Trump could make a lot of history – good history – in the next two weeks, predicts Hugh Hewitt at The Washington Post, provided he can “reach back to his inner gambler” and ignore his usual advisers on immigration. He should heed the advice of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and go big, “in an unexpected direction,” to solve the shutdown impasse. Bigger than what he offered the Democrats on Saturday. Like endorsing a current GOP proposal for a $25 billion border security endowment, whose earnings will be available to both Trump and future presidents. To do that also means offering more than “a temporary fix” on DACA: “Trump must secure the position of the more than 10 million people in the country without permission” via “a path to permanent residency.”

Conservative: Kamala Harris’ Hypocrisy on ‘Decency’
Sen. Kamala Harris declared her candidacy for president Monday via a Twitter video featuring what Red State’s Brandon Morse calls “a lot of buzzwords, the first of them being ‘truth,’ ‘justice’ and ‘decency.’ ” Which he finds pretty ironic, given that the California Democrat just recently tried to “smear and collapse the life and career of a man who was very highly likely to be innocent of the charges she and her Democratic colleagues were throwing at him.” Harris, he reminds us, was “one of the worst culprits” in the attacks on Brett Kavanaugh, “many of which involved spreading lies about him and his character.” All of which suggests that “truth, justice, and decency apparently are just words to her.”

Law prof: Don’t Violate the Constitution to Protect It
A lengthy and much-discussed article by Yoni Applebaum in The Atlantic proposes that Congress immediately begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump for being unfit for office and evincing little respect for the rule of law, regardless of whether or not he has committed any crimes. But as Alan Dershowitz points out at The Hill, the Framers “explicitly rejected” those criteria for impeachment and “demanded that the high constitutional threshold” of high crimes and misdemeanors be met. Fact is, Applebaum’s criteria “could be applied to any president.” But he also suggests that even if it fails, impeachment would be “the best way to run out the clock on the administration.” Such an approach, says Dershowitz, would only “encourage wrongful weaponization of impeachment as a partisan political tactic to be deployed by both parties.”

Capitol watch: Senator Doubles Down on Anti-CatholicismNational Review’s Alessandra de Sanctis reports that in response to a resolution rejecting the use of unconstitutional religious tests for public office, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) accused its author, Sen. Ben Sasse, of seeking to “embrace the alt-right position.” Which is “as irresponsible as it is unfounded”: Sasse “has been one of the most outspoken Republican senators against the alt-right.” Yet Hirono, recall, along with Sen. Kamala Harris, recently pressed a Catholic judicial nominee, Brian Buescher, about his membership in the Knights of Columbus: Hirono even demanded that he resign from the group and “recuse himself from any case on which the group has taken a position.” That not only “reeks of bigotry,” but – her denials notwithstanding – very clearly constitutes a religious test for office.